The Dad

My dad has arrived! My mom has work that brought her to Thailand, dad came with her but she had to go to Cambodia and Taiwan first so he came up to Chaingmai while she travels. He'll be here for a week before my mom comes and then we'll have a week and a half together. So excited about their visit!

Costs of the Day . . .

+ Eating traditional Thai food at a local noodle shop for lunch:
$0.57 usd (20 baht)
+ Drinking ice coffee out a plastic bag:
$0.34 usd (12 baht)
+ Ice to heal the welt on the head of the women we watched fall out of the back of a truck onto the paved road where we were eating lunch:
$0.14 usd (5 baht) donated by the noodle shop
+ Looking out the school office window and seeing the little boy who lives in the shack behind the school with a spiderman t-shirt and NO pants with his bare butt turned our way while he peed on the fence:
PRICELESS

Life

We visited one of the children's homes where a lot of the students that we teach live. The translation of the home's name means Life. It's an amazing place. They have set up such a great program for children who are at risk for being sold into prostituation or who have been rescued from dangerous and abusive situations. These children are so loved and well taken care of. I adored every minute of the visit. We played with the kids and they sang songs to us and then us teachers had to scramble to sing songs to them (for those of you who have heard my voice - EEEK!). I love these children. They may not live with their birth mom and dads, but they have earthly moms and dads at this house that love them more than they'll ever know. Beyond that, they have a Heavenly Father that adores them and because they live at this house, they have the opportunity to learn about His love for them.

Here are a couple pics.

I look like I'm yelling at this child but I promise I'm not. All three girls are in my 4th grade class and I am just teasing with them. Please do not contact my boss and tell him I am a bad teacher, lol. :-)

Eskimo kiss. Aww. Just met this little preschooler but already love her.

Here is a video of a few of the third graders singing a Thai song about a chicken. Basically they are the chicken and they are talking about getting poked with a skewer in the left and the right and then being cooked, lol. There is a little dance they do and the kid on the right in the blue gets SO into it. I heart this video.

School Status, Curry, Facepainting - PICS!

I know it's kind of difficult to understand (even for me) the details behind the status of the school. We are currently working on our school licensing, but in the meantime, we were partnering with another Christian school and were working offsite from them in an abandoned government building that we had permission to fix up and use for the year until we obtained our school license - at that time, we'd need to have a building that we could lease long term (which the government building wouldn't suffice). However, after just 3 months, the community leaders decided they didn't want our school in the building any longer and the short story is that we were forced out of that building. We started working on site at the other school and integrated all our students together. The other school (Mitrijit) is where our students are registered but they have a different approach to teaching than we do but all our students would take the same standardized tests. For the last month of this past term, we commuted to Mitrijit (about a 45 minute commute one way) and combined all our students. This week was the last week of the term. Our school is still seeking licensure in which our students could then be registered under our school. In the meantime, for term 2 (from now until March '10), we are required to continue to teach at Mitrijit (at least for now, things constantly change and nothing is written in stone :-). Because of our bi-lingual program and the advantage of teaching our students with smaller class sizes (our class sizes don't exceed 10 where as Mitrijit has over 30 kids in each class), we feel it's best to keep our children separate ad continue to run our program. The space is very limited and we are trying to think of creative ways to setup classrooms under a pavilion. While the situation isn't ideal, we have seen God working in so many ways. We found another building that we are renting and we have been fixing up.

Yesterday, we did a community outreach carnival for the students we teach as well as the community around us in order to build relationships. We are on "break" right now and will be able to take some time off but the rest of the time we will continue to build our curriculum and work on things for next term. Our plan is to be up and running as our own school starting in May '10. This is the reader's digest version and I hope it's helpful to let you know the latest info. Here are pics from the Outreach - we served Chicken Green Curry, had an air castle, face painted (that was my job for 2 and 1/2 hours straight and I loved every minute of it), and played all sorts of games.

The new school building

My job: facepainting.

Teacher's setting up games.



A lot of our students.


Spicy Chicken Green Curry . . . mmmmm.

Thai teachers - fun with noodles.

Spectators from the community.

Fun and games.

My friend and co-4th grade teacher . . . she's going to work at the preschool. I will miss her :-(.